Winterland
by Iellix
Summary: Hatter's growing very tired of his first winter in New York; Alice is growing very tired of Hatter getting sick of winter. So they pack up and head for warmer climes--a winter without a winter.
1. Winterland

So, after writing 'Dirty Little Secrets' and getting through a string of variously depressing and heavy chapters in that long chaptered fic I keep talking about (which, by the way, still doesn't have a name—and that's all that stops me from posting it, really), I felt like setting it all aside for a while to write something cute, fluffy, and funny. This little germ of an idea started as an unintentional entry to a quarterly challenge in one of the LiveJournal 'Alice' communities. And then it exploded into a full-blown story of its own. I never meant to write a story like this, I swear.

Disclaimer: I do not own Alice or Hatter, or Carol, or the scary sci-fi version of Wonderland.

o…o

The wind blew at _just_ the right angle that it went up her pants legs and chilled her all the way up to her butt, and Alice squirmed and walked faster. She couldn't get home fast enough.

The sky was a solid grey slab overhead, the wind bit, and every few hours it rained or sleeted. It was a perfectly dreary winter day—at least in December winter seemed a little more cheerful because people were looking forward to Christmas and there were trees decorated and lampposts wrapped in garlands. By the end of January, everything was grey and sodden and everyone looked forward to the warmer weather.

Perhaps the person who looked forward to the warm weather the most was Hatter.

They reached her apartment from opposite directions at the same time and Alice had to stop walking so she could laugh at him.

He was wrapped up in a heavy wool coat that he said was called a Duffel coat, which was completely shapeless and looked bulletproof and smelled funky whenever it got wet; he had the hood up and a long purple scarf wrapped about half a dozen times around his neck and over his mouth and nose, heavy boots, and two pairs of gloves. Even though she couldn't see, she was pretty sure he was wearing several pairs of socks and probably long johns, too. He had an ever-present travel-mug of tea in one hand and the other was jammed in his pocket.

"What's so funny?" He demanded as she laughed, his voice muffled through the scarf.

"Hatter, are you _in there_ somewhere?" She stood on her toes and pulled his scarf down with her fingers.

"It's not funny, you know," he grumbled. "I'm _cold._ It's _freezing_ here! How do you _stand it?"_

She shrugged. "I'm cold, too, but I don't complain about it. Complaining won't make it spring any faster, you know. Didn't you have winter in Wonderland?"

"Well, _yes,_ but it was just _cold,_ not vaporizing-hot-water _freezing,"_ he whined.

Alice rolled her eyes. In an effort to show him exactly how cold 'below zero' was, she took a cup of boiling water outside and threw it in the air—it turned to ice before it hit the ground, and Hatter thought it was terrifying. The man who lived in the same world as the Jabberwocky and the Queen of Hearts was afraid of the cold.

"That's just what happens when it gets cold enough—like when you can see your breath and stick your tongue to a pole. Just a fact of nature."

"Can we go inside, please?" He asked. "It's awful out here."

"You really are a sissy."

"I'm not a sissy, I'm _freezing! _I'm wearing so many pairs of shorts my thighs don't know each other anymore!"

She laughed again. She couldn't help it. But she let him in because he was totally pathetic.

The inside stairway of the apartment was only a fraction of a degree warmer than outside.

"Will your tongue really stick to a pole?" He asked, leaning casually on one of the metal poles.

"Yeah, why?"

"I just can't see how that would work. Surely your body temperature is enough to keep it from freezing."

"Just trust me, it's not."

She went up the next flight of stairs but became aware he wasn't behind her anymore. She looked over to the next landing down.

He was looking at one of the poles.

"Hohmygod, don't!" She called down. "Never mind how stupid it is, d'you have any idea how dirty those poles are? You could get syphilis off of that thing if you go tongue-kissing it!"

"I just wanna see if it'll stick."

"It _will_ stick, and it'll be painful, and that pole is _filthy!"_

But there was no convincing Hatter when the prospect of doing his own little experiment was at hand. He had an insatiable urge to _figure out_ everything, and for all that he was extremely cautious in Wonderland—_she_ was the reckless one then—sometimes he did stupid things here when he went into some impromptu hands-on experiment that could end in any number of horrible ways. Like when he spent a few days in his new apartment—Jack's old apartment—trying to see what he could put down the garbage disposal. (He stopped after he destroyed a pair of chopsticks leftover from Chinese takeout.)

And now he was in the stairwell outside her apartment, tentatively pressing the tip of his tongue to a metal pole just to see if it would stick.

Which it did.

"Oh my god, that's disgusting," she groaned.

"Thtuk," he slurred.

"Of course you're stuck. I _told_ you you'd get stuck. I should just leave you here."

He gave a quick tug, thinking he could get free that way, and his eyes went wide when he was still stuck quite firm to the pole.

"Uh-oh…"

"Satisfied?" Alice asked, leaning against the adjacent wall.

He nodded, trying to look at her with what she knew was his best big-puppy-eyes look.

Part of her just wanted to leave him stuck there for doing something so stupid, but she wasn't _that_ cruel. She took his teacup and unscrewed the lid.

"Here, move your body back as much as you can," she said. Then she dribbled a bit of the hot tea on the icy pole to melt the seal.

She gave him his cup back and continued on her way up to her apartment.

Once inside, it took Hatter several minutes to unwrap himself from his heavy coat and the jacket under it and the scarf that was longer than he was tall.

"I can't _believe_ you _did that!"_ Alice laughed. "It's so stupid! Everybody here knows not to do that."

"Yeh, weh… I didn' fink ih' would work like tha'," he said, his tongue still hanging out of his mouth.

"Well, now you know."

He made a little whining noise.

Goodness, he was piteous.

She cupped his cold cheeks in her hands and brought him down to kiss him.

"You'll survive the winter, I'm sure," she murmured.

Instead of answering, he followed her and kissed her.

o…o

I don't know what it is, but people are always driven to stick their tongues to metal poles in winter, especially if they've never been somewhere that it's cold enough for it to actually stick. The result it always the same: their tongue sticks, and they're _shocked._ I swear this story has a plot, I just wanted to use this very short chapter to set the stage—it's winter and no one is happy about it.

This story will be updated weekly; that's my usual routine. Feedback, should you choose to leave it, would be greatly appreciate. I hope you enjoyed the read!


	2. Ice, Ice

I had to post this chapter early. This morning I woke up to two feet of snow. How appropriate. (At least it wasn't ice.)

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters. Really. Truly. I mean this.

o…o

Even though her mother sometimes gave her funny looks about it, Alice spent quite a few nights in Hatter's apartment. She was an adult, after all. But really, though, staying overnight and getting to the 'toothbrush-at-his-place' stage was something Alice rarely did with her boyfriends, and that she was doing it with Hatter—and not freaking out as was her customary reaction—came as such a shock to Carol that she probably forgot to scold her about it.

She woke up groggily, under a pile of heavy blankets and pressed up firmly against Hatter's back. He was wearing silky pajamas—he actually wore proper _pajamas_ to sleep in, which Alice thought was kind of ridiculously cute—and he was nice and warm so she snuggled up close to him and refused to get out of bed. The room was cold and she was perfectly comfy where she was.

Hatter rolled over and put an arm around her and nuzzled her hair; she smiled.

"We've gotta get out of bed eventually," he murmured.

She shook her head. "Don't wanna."

"Me neither."

He wrapped her up in his arms and legs and left soft warm kisses under her ear and down to her shoulder. His stubble rasped on her skin and made her giggle. Then he pushed her shirt to the side so he could get at more bare skin and she stopped giggling.

It was just getting good when Alice's phone rang.

"Ignore it," he purred into her ear. Then he tugged her earlobe in his teeth.

She was _really_ tempted to ignore the ringing, especially with Hatter's hands sliding up her sides and his stubble tickling down from her cheek to her neck to her chest…

But that ringing was hard to ignore and eventually she sat up and grabbed the phone with one hand and pushed Hatter away with the other.

"Hello?"

It was Greg from the dojo.

"_Morning, Alice. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?"_

She looked over at the clock, worrying she might've overslept more than she realized. The absurdly ornate gilt clock on one of the bedside tables read 8.30.

"Greg, it's not even nine in the morning yet! I don't have to be in until ten, what the hell—what d'you want?"

She stumbled a little with her words because Hatter was persistently mouthing ticklish little kisses down her neck and nudging her sleeping tank down so he lip the gentle swell of her breasts. His hands were on the small of her back and his fingers were stroking back and forth.

It took a lot of willpower to push him back. He gave her a sweet, innocent smile and stretched up to kiss her throat; she moved the phone away from her mouth so Greg wouldn't hear her purr.

"_Oh, I guess you haven't looked outside, have you?"_

"No, I haven't looked outside," she said flatly. "Why, is New York not there anymore or something? Godzilla attacking the city?"

Hatter mouthed, 'what's wrong?', and she frowned and shrugged.

"_You'd better go look. And give yourself some extra time to get to work. Like about two hours."_

Alice frowned and swatted Hatter again as he started trying to seduce her off the phone. This time he started from the waist of her sweatpants and went up, lipping the soft skin of her stomach and kissing slowly and pushing her shirt up over her breasts. She shifted and planted a foot on his chest and locked her knee to hold him back.

"What happened?" She asked.

"_Ice. Lots of it. It's like someone hacked nature and turned all the friction off. Be careful, and if you really don't feel safe just call—I can't imagine we'll have too much business on a day like this. Zander and Jenny already called out."_

She sighed. "All right, thanks for the head's up," she said, then hung up.

Hatter was tracing circles on her knee with his fingers.

"What's that all about?" He asked.

"You're gonna make me crazy, you know," she told him.

"Mad as a hatter?" He asked in a silky-smooth voice as he slipped one hand up the leg of her sweats, sliding his fingers up her calf and tickling the soft underside of her knee until it buckled and he could get back close to her again. He pulled her leg around his hip and moved up and kissed her.

She sighed happily. If he was intent on driving her crazy, then she'd enjoy the ride.

He smiled against her neck and gave her a hot, open-mouthed kiss on the side. He was just starting to suck the skin into his mouth when Alice gave him a push.

"Nuh-uh!" She said firmly. "Not that again!"

He looked at her like a kicked puppy.

"I'm tired of turning up at work with hickeys all over my neck—if you're gonna do that, at least do it where no one else will see it!"

He took that as an open invitation. "If you insist," he said smoothly. Before she could react, he pulled her tank down and left a red-purple love bite on the top of her right breast.

"You done?" She asked, feigning exasperation.

He nuzzled her chest. "Not even close."

Hatter always, _always_ made it impossible for her to get out of bed. Sometimes it was because sleeping on him was comfy and snuggly warm—and other times it was because he was biting her neck and doing pants-dampeningly hot things to her under her clothes with his hands or his mouth.

Right now it was the latter.

She felt stubble on her belly under her navel and he pulled at her waistband with his teeth and she briefly considered staying in bed until the weekend and it was only Tuesday.

But she was too responsible for her own good and she forced herself to push him off.

He sulked.

She took the top blanket with her when she climbed out of bed and shuffled on the cold floor over to the dresser. She'd been spending enough days—and nights—at Hatter's place that she kept some of her things here. Like clothes. And a toothbrush.

One glance out the window and her jaw dropped.

"Holy shit."

"What?" Hatter asked. "Is New York not there anymore?"

"Holy _shit."_

The world outside was one gigantic sheet of ice. It was everywhere, two inches thick—on the road, the pavements, making icicles off of the streetlights, sealing the hatch on the mailbox outside. The skinny little trees lining the avenue were covered in it, too, their branches sagging with the extra weight. Pedestrians, those who were brave enough or stupid enough to try and conquer the ice, were sliding this way and that on the icy ground, performing amazing rubber-legged ballets as they grasped at anything anchored to the ground in hopes of not ending up on their butts. Most of them failed.

An unusually stupid person was attempting to drive a car. The wheels spun helplessly and the tires squealed and the car went every direction except where the driver wanted to go. It got halfway up the hill outside the apartment building and began going backwards, turning sideways and bouncing like a very slow-moving pinball off the mailbox and a streetlight before coming to rest with the distinct _crunch!_ of a crumbling fender against a fire hydrant. The driver got out and swore violently in Russian so loudly that even up on the third floor through the closed windows they could clearly hear him.

"Wow," was all Hatter said. Then: "Shit."

He stood behind her, leaning into her back and watching the activity outside over her shoulder for several minutes.

"D'you ever have _normal_ weather here?"

"Occasionally," she said. "They call for a state-wide day of celebration when that happens."

"Really?" He asked, apparently believing her.

"No, not really. I was just joking."

She put on tights and heavy knee-socks under her jeans because she was pretty sure the buses weren't going to be running until they got the roads salted, which would probably be about fifteen minutes before all the ice melted because the city was apparently run by mollusks whenever something _really_ needed to happen. So, she was going to have to walk to work.

Fun.

"Is it even safe?" Hatter asked over breakfast tea.

"Safe-ish," she replied.

"But what about what happened with that car? What if someone hits you?"

"I like to think I'm quick enough on my feet to get the fuck out of the way. Anyway, only _really stupid _people drive on days like this. Really, the biggest danger is that I'll fall on my ass a few times."

"You have an ass that is most certainly not something that should be fallen on," he declared.

She shrugged and finished her tea. "I know how to walk on it. It's just a matter of jumping from one lightpost to another."

"As long as you're sure," he said warily.

It was much, _much_ easier said than done.

The very nanosecond they stepped outside, Hatter's feet shot out from under him and he landed _hard_ on the ice.

"Ow."

"Are you okay?" Alice asked quickly from the safety of a nearby streetlamp.

"Ow."

"Hatter."

"That ice is _hard,"_ he said.

He struggled to get his feet back under him. He was up for less than a second before he slipped again and ended up on his back.

And then on his knees.

And then on his butt again.

"Why do all of my body parts have to come down and inspect the ice for themselves? Can't they just take my word for it? The ice is hard!"

"You're not hurt, are you?"

"Just my ego. I lived in a city built ten miles off the ground and I was _fine!_ But I come here and I fall all over the ice."

She couldn't help but laugh at him. It was too hard not to.

"I'm glad _you_ think it's funny."

He dragged himself to the mailbox, now leaning slightly to one side where the car had hit it, and pulled himself up. He held onto it for dear life.

"Okay," he said to no one in particular. "I think I'm good."

His feet slipped but he stayed upright.

"So, this is how it works," she said. "You've gotta go a little bit at a time, see? And grab onto the closest thing that looks like it can hold you up."

She showed him how to make his way a little bit at a time up the hill, moving from streetlamp to signpost to fire hydrant to another streetlamp, but she was starting to think it wasn't worth it. This was dangerous even by _her_ standards.

Hatter, unused to having no friction under his feet, kept losing his balance and ending up in sexually compromising positions with trees and lamps.

"Are you even gonna get there on time?" He asked. "I mean, I can't imagine you will…"

Probably not, she thought. She might not even get to work at all at this rate.

Then she missed grabbing the next lamppost and ended up sliding halfway back down the hill and things started unfolding like a slapstick movie. They couldn't get more than twenty feet before ending right back where they started again, losing their footing.

"This is _so_ not worth it," she declared, sticking out one arm and expertly catching the next lamp with one hand and reaching into her bag for her cell phone with the other to call the dojo.

Hatter came sliding down the hill a few feet away from her in a sitting position with his chin resting on his fist, adopting the expression of a man who had completely given up.

"I just wanna say here and now that I hate this," he said flatly as he slid by her, not even bothering to try and get a hold on something and hoping that he'd eventually lose momentum before he ended up in Albany.

Alice looped her arm around the lamp and used that hand to hold the phone to her ear while she hooked her free hand into the collar of Hatter's coat to stop him sliding any further.

"Hi, it's Alice," she said when someone picked up.

"_Please don't tell me you're bailing, too,"_ came the voice on the other end. It wasn't Greg; it was Kirk, whom she didn't like and always threw fits at every little inconvenience.

She helped Hatter stand up as she talked.

"Look, I'm sorry, but I've been trying to climb the same hill now for the last half hour and I think I've gotten about fifty feet."

She heard Kirk sigh heavily into the phone.

"I just don't feel safe. Even if I _do_ get to work, how many people are gonna be coming for lessons today?"

He made a whining noise like a little kid who wanted a lollipop and his mother wouldn't buy one for him.

"I've already talked to Greg—where is he?"

"_In the john."_

"Well he told me to call if I couldn't come, and I can't come. Just let him know. You'll live, I'm sure."

"_Half the staff is calling out today!" _Kirk whined. _"Is there _any_ way you can make it?"_

She sighed heavily. "Gee, I'm sorry, all of my spelunking gear is in the shop."

Hatter snickered.

And then Kirk swore loudly and she had to pull the phone away from her ear.

"And I don't appreciate language like that this early in the morning," she said evenly.

He grumbled.

"Tell me something," she said sweetly. "How many of the morning classes have turned up?"

Pause.

"Kirk?"

"_None."_

"All righty, then. Well I think you can get by with Greg until they send someone around here to clear the ice off the ground."

She hung up the phone before he had a chance to say anything else.

"You're not gonna lose your job, are you?" Hatter asked, looking concerned.

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. "Naw. Kirk doesn't have that authority. He doesn't even have a belt. He's just the desk-man who likes to complain a lot."

"So does this mean we can go back inside?" He begged.

"Yeah, c'mon."

She went to take off her tights because she didn't need to wear them inside, but she didn't get as far as putting her jeans back on because Hatter seemed determined to pick up where they left off in bed that morning.

He put his hat on one of the bedposts and tore her jeans out of her hands and threw them across the room. Then he picked her up and dumped her into bed.

She could get used to icy days this way.

o…o

I live in one of those awkward meteorological places where we get really bad ice storms more than snowstorms. I don't like either, but I hate snow less because at least you can _shovel_ that. Ice just sits there mocking you. How many more days until spring? 


	3. Making Plans

The weather here is downright schizophrenic. I wrote this chapter (two and a half weeks ago) in a miniskirt from a coffee shop. I'm posting it today during another snowstorm, which is supposed to drop another ten inches on top of the 27 we already have. In the words of Hatter: I hate this.

o…o

The salt trucks didn't get around to treating the roads until late afternoon, and by then most of the people on the block had gone outside with shovels and enormous boxes of rock salt to treat the sidewalks themselves. It was evening before it was safe enough for Hatter and Alice to venture out of the apartment to get something to eat. Neither of them wanted to cook and anyway, Hatter wasn't too good about keeping food around. The sky was still dead-dull grey and the wind had picked up and the air was dry and so cold it actually hurt to breathe it.

They picked the deli on the corner for no other reason than because it was closest to Hatter's apartment and because they didn't feel like hailing a cab and risking death on the still-treacherous roads or jumping on a bus.

They sat in a booth with their sandwiches and pastries watching the pedestrians hitting the odd icy patch outside.

"How many more days until spring?" He asked.

"Not until April. But around here sometimes we get snow up to May."

He grunted.

Their quiet conversation was interrupted occasionally when Hatter looked nervously at the highly pierced teenager behind the counter who was giving him the eye, heedless of Alice sending death stares her way and Hatter looking incredibly uncomfortable.

He especially was hating the cold weather, even though only a month before he'd been thrilled by it. He saw his first snowstorm within a week of arriving and she took him outside to play in it like a _really excited_ little kid. Then the snowstorm got _really_ heavy and they came back into his apartment and waited it out together, which was much more fun. But they'd gotten snow three times since then, and ice, and some of those really cold vaporizing-hot-water days since then and now he wasn't so thrilled about the cold. The novelty had worn off.

They finished dinner and sat in the booth for a little while, until the counter-girl's lusty stares actually became palpable, and then pulled their coats and scarves and gloves on for the treacherous ten-minute trek through the cold all the way back to his apartment.

Hatter made a deliberate show of nuzzling her ear in full view of the girl at the counter; Alice pinched him on the leg under his coat. Cheeky.

Another car lost traction on the road, turning in slow-motion sideways and then backwards and going slow-slow-slow down the hill. People on the road and people indoors came out to watch it slide into a parked car. It set off the alarm.

Alice sighed. She was getting very tired of winter, too.

A radio blaring out of someone's ground-floor apartment was tuned into a weather report that forecast more 'weather' over the coming days. Why they always called it 'weather', like it would somehow lessen the blow of the ice and snow once it got here, never made any sense to her.

"They always call it 'weather'," Hatter observed, as if reading her thoughts. "That's stupid. What do they think it's doing outside the rest of the time—idling?"

She snorted.

"It might _sound_ better than coming right out and saying, 'hey, get out your snow shovels, everyone, you'll be digging your way out of a nipple-high snowdrift by lunchtime tomorrow!', but in the end the result's the same."

"I'm proud of you, Hatter," she said. "Most people live around here for _years_ before they become that cynical."

"I've had years of practice as a cynic," he declared proudly.

The car driven by the angry Russian that had crashed into the mailbox that morning was finally gone, but all up the road there were signs and streetlamps all leaning at right angles in testament to the determination of people to _drive_ today.

The wind picked up as they made their way inside.

Coats and scarves and layers came off again and Alice changed back into her sweats. She'd be sleeping here again. There was no way in hell she was going home, not tonight. Not unless she wanted to end up with a broken collarbone.

But that really wasn't a big loss, she decided as Hatter came up behind her and planted a kiss on the back of her neck.

And then, perhaps predictably, her phone rang.

"I think it does that on purpose," she grumbled as she went to answer it.

"You _could_ turn it off, you know," he pointed out. "Then it wouldn't do things like interrupt us."

"Don't whine, you can't _possibly_ be turning blue over there."

"You could check."

She stuck her tongue out at him and answered the phone.

"Oh, hello Aunt Margo," she said when she heard the voice on the other end. This could've been a call that could be ignored, she thought absently as she saw Hatter at the kitchen table with his head down sulkily on his folded arms like a scolded schoolboy.

Margo was her mother's oldest sister, who lived in Florida and liked to do cruel things like call when they were freezing their butts off in New York and tell them the temperature in Miami.

"_I hear you're a little cold up in the frigid north,"_ she drawled.

"It's Staten Island, Margo, not Iceland."

"_It was 75 degrees here. I spent the day on the beach in my bathing suit with a sign hanging off my chair saying 'Attention Young People: This Is Your Future'." _Margo cackled. _"I think I've just paid for new yachts for all the skull-jockeys in Dade County."_

She would have laughed because her aunt was in the habit of doing things like that—when a person got to that age, she supposed, they'd earned the right to be as silly as they pleased—but she was so sick of winter and didn't like the idea that there were people in the country who could do things like go to the beach and lounge in temperatures in the mid-70s.

"I hate you, too, Margo," she said, then hung up the phone.

"What was that about?" Hatter asked.

"My aunt likes to call and tell us the daily temperature in Miami. Just to rub it in that we live where there actually _is_ a winter."

Pause.

"There's a place where there's _no winter?"_ He asked, looking quite shocked. "How do they manage _that?"_

"It's just a warm climate. Miami—Florida, the whole state—is in the south, where it never gets cold."

He sat quietly absorbing that for a while.

"Really? No snow, no ice? No quintupling up on my underwear so I don't freeze to death?"

She giggled and sat up on the kitchen table next to him. "Yep. It's nice for the winter, but in the summer it gets muggy and sweaty."

"The 'no winter' thing is tempting, though."

"Yeah."

"Maybe we should go there."

He meant it entirely in seriousness, but she jokingly said, "Sure, Hatter. Sure."

The next afternoon she went back to her mother's apartment because she was running out of clean clothes at Hatter's place, even though he suggested she should just walk around without them. And at the time—cramped in the tiny shower and fogging up the mirrors—it was an _awfully_ tempting idea. And then they turned off the water and she had to walk on the really cold floor and she decided that walking around naked was best reserved for times of the year when there wasn't that cheerful little below-zero nip in the air.

"Mom, I'm back!" She called as she walked in.

"Nice of you to stop by," Carol said in mock-exasperation. "Is David with you?"

Even a few months after he turned up on this side of the Looking Glass under the assumed name of 'David', Alice still had some difficulty remembering that when people talked about _David_ they were referring to _Hatter._

"No, he's at home," she said.

Her mother appeared in the kitchen door. "I do wish you'd tell me when you were going to stay overnight at his place," she sighed. "I get worried when you don't come home. Especially in bad weather."

"It's not like we actively planned for it," she defended herself. "I _couldn't_ get home yesterday."

"Yeah, I know. Nobody could go anywhere until the city came to fix the roads. I almost broke my neck going out for the newspaper."

Pause.

"So, you stayed over a few days with David."

And Alice braced herself, thinking she was going to get some lecture about being responsible and how she shouldn't move so fast if she wasn't ready for it and this that and the other that she'd already heard, by her own calculations, about eight thousand times since the age of eighteen when she wanted to move in with her then-boyfriend after high school.

"Next time let me know so I don't worry," was all she said before making her way into the living room with a cup of coffee.

That was probably hugely significant but Alice was too relieved not to have been lectured to think about it.

"Oh, Aunt Margo called me last night," she said, following her.

"Oh yeah? Let me guess, it's a hundred degrees on Miami Beach and she's got a tan?"

"She hung out on a beach in her bathing suit scaring the youth of Florida."

"One of these days they're gonna lock her up."

"Mom, she's almost sixty. If they haven't locked her up by now for being a crazy woman, then I think you're outta luck."

"You didn't argue with her on speaker-phone in front of David, did you?"

"No, but I did have to explain why I said 'I hate you too'."

'I hate you' was the customary greeting and closing of conversations among Carol and her two sisters and their families. Carol was the middle of three girls, with Margo twelve years older and Emily eight years younger, and all of them New York girls at heart no matter how far from the state they ventured. Affection was measured in levels of insult. And volume. Lots and lots of volume.

"He must think we have the most dysfunctional family," she sighed. "What's his family like, d'you know?"

"They're all back in England," she said quickly, a well-rehearsed lie that she and Hatter came up with to dodge the question. "He doesn't talk to them too much since he moved."

"That's a shame."

She shrugged.

"He was mostly interested in Miami," she said, changing the subject. "Wanted to know what it was like there."

"How come?"

"He's sick of winter."

"But doesn't he come from somewhere just a few inches outside of the Arctic Circle?"

"Yorkshire isn't _that_ far north, Mom."

"If it's far enough north to see the Arctic Lights, it counts."

She gave a shrug. "When I left he was having a bitch over how cold it was. It doesn't get like this where he's from."

That wasn't entirely a lie—Hatter told her that it got _cold_ in Wonderland's bizarre elevated city, but that it hardly ever snowed. And even if it _did_ snow or ice, it would only get on the top layers of the city and those who lived lower down were unaffected. Living so close and crammed in together with so many other people in such a relatively small space—the city was so crowded that it actually made Alice ridiculously happy for the relative spaciousness of New York—the warmth of all those people actually elevated the local temperature by several degrees.

"To be honest, I'm kinda sick of winter, too. I'm ready for spring."

"We all are."

Her mother sipped her coffee and opened up her magazine to read all of Oprah's opinions about sex and men and politics and cheesecake recipes. Then she looked up.

"Would you like to go to Miami?" Carol asked.

"And miss all this? You nuts?"

Pause.

"Wait, are you serious?"

She shrugged. "Sure. You're going stir-crazy, you have plenty of time off from work you can use. Take David and make like the geese and fly south for the winter. Or for a couple of weeks, anyway."

"Geese don't fly south, Mom, you know that. They go from the movie theatre parking lot to the golf course to the schoolyard and back."

Then she switched to seriousness.

"You're seriously saying that I should take Ha—David—and go to Aunt Margo's?"

"Well, call her first, obviously, so she knows you're coming. Last thing you wanna do is walk in when she's in the middle of a cabana boy."

"To Miami. With David."

"Sure. Why, do you want to go alone and leave him to turn into a Brit-cicle?"

"No, I'm just surprised that you're so open to the idea of me going on vacation with a boyfriend. Come to think of it, I'm surprised you're okay with me staying overnight at his place. Usually if I do that you tell me I'm moving too fast and I'll just make myself go off the deep end again. Are you that desperate to be rid of me?"

"Yes," Carol said quickly. Then she grinned and put her magazine down. "I've just never seen you so happy and at-ease with a guy before. Except JD, but he doesn't count because he was never actually your boyfriend."

"And you're okay with it?"

"You're an adult, Alice. You can do whatever you want."

Her mother was being uncharacteristically nonchalant about this whole thing.

"I've seen you move on a lot in the last few months. Ever since you decided to stop looking for Daddy, it's like you're a whole new person." Then she shrugged and picked up her coffee cup. "And anyway, I like David. I mean, he's a little odd and he dresses like an extra in a gay Mardi Gras crowd scene, and sometimes it's like he comes from another planet—but he's as sweet as can be and he makes you happy."

o…o

I'm not entirely sure if Hatter would dress like an extra in a gay Mardi Gras crowd scene, but the line was too good not to utilize somewhere. Alice and Hatter go to Miami! They could use a mini-vacation. Plus there's spectacular potential there to encounter some quizzical relatives. Because no story would ever be complete would quizzical relatives. And volume. Lots and lots of volume. (My mother has two sisters. This is how they roll, I swear. I am so glad they're three hundred miles away.)

And yes, you can see the Northern Lights from northern England.


	4. Come Fly With Me

I meant to post this chapter yesterday, but I got go shovelling and then I got to celebrating because they _finally_ ploughed my street (we have three feet of snow) and I could get out. After running all of my errands that I haven't been able to run for days, I completely forgot about it. This is why I have things like post-it notes and a white board. Otherwise I'd forget everything. Enjoy the read!

o…o

"We're going to Florida?" He asked. "Really? You, and me? Going to Miami and we're not going to have to rent sled-dogs and a sleigh in order to get to work?"

Alice giggled. "Yep!"

"And it was _your mother's_ idea?"

She nodded.

"My aunt will put us up for as long as we care to stay there. She likes having people in her house."

Hatter was practically giddy at the whole prospect. He went into the library and read absolutely everything he could about Florida, and he came back one day declaring that the entire state looked like male genitalia and exactly whose idea was it to do that. Then he started in with information about the state and its entry to the Union and the Civil War and government in details that she was pretty sure that even people who _lived_ there didn't know.

But that was Hatter. Insatiably curious with a thirst for knowledge. That was part of what she loved so much about him.

That, and that he could make her laugh by comparing Florida to a penis.

Getting to Miami meant going by plane, which Alice never liked. She was terrified of heights and being in an airplane with the entire world a distant speck below the clouds always intensified her fear. Driving to Miami wasn't really an option, though, because she'd done that exactly once about five years ago and it hadn't turned out well, mostly because she got speeding tickets in three different states—including Virginia, where they _could've_ thrown her in jail for it but didn't. And because she got hopelessly lost and kept taking inadvertent trips to towns with worrying names like 'Toad Suck' and where the people all looked like they were the result of generations of faithful cousin-breeding.

So, a plane it was. A plane flying miles over the ground.

She made damn sure to book an aisle seat.

She distracted herself from thinking about the inevitable plane trip by helping Hatter pack.

Despite the perk of Miami being a warm climate, she had to very slowly, very _carefully_ explain to him that he was going to have to pack clothes that weren't long pants and long-sleeved shirts and coats.

"How much warmer is warmer?" He asked as she went through all of his clothes.

"Shorts-weather warmer," she said.

He looked indignant. "Short trousers? Those are for children."

"Not here they're not. And if you wear long pants in Miami you'll get all sweaty and gross."

"An excuse to shower a lot," he offered, standing behind her and running a fingernail up the dip in her spine.

"Sweat's not sexy." Even though that was a boldfaced lie. "Why d'you have so many vests?" She asked as she kept going through the contents of his closet.

"They're called 'waistcoats', Alice. A vest is what you wear _under_ your shirt."

"That's an undershirt."

"Uh-huh. And suspenders are menswear, right?"

She turned around and leaned on the closet door. "Are we gonna get into another one of those 'what's the word' arguments? Because if we are we'll have to postpone our trip, the flight's on Saturday."

The last time they had an argument about the right words for things it'd lasted an entire day and gone from 'braces' to every euphemism they could think of for sex, and Alice missed work.

Despite Wonderland being more or less an entirely different universe, Hatter was up to his eyeballs in deeply-ingrained British terminology, as well as some of the rather more dismayingly freakish terms from Wonderland. Hatter needed subtitles. Sometimes whole conversations would go by before either of them worked out they were talking about different things.

He also had no suitable clothing for warm weather. Whether it was because he assumed it was always this cold here or just figured he'd buy more appropriate clothing if and when he had to she didn't know. But she couldn't let him be just as uncomfortable in Florida as he was here, so she took him shopping for something he _could_ pack.

Finding beachwear in the middle of January would have been difficult in most places, she thought, but not around here. That was a perk of living in a city as amazingly diverse as this one. You could find absolutely _anything_ here.

Half a day's shopping, five pairs of shorts, two sets of swim trunks, and about three million of the most loud and obnoxious Hawaiian shirts in the northern hemisphere later, she was satisfied he had everything he'd need.

Really, she shouldn't known he'd go for the really annoying radioactive-Kool-Aid-coloured shirts. That's just what he liked. He was like a kid in a candy store with those shirts and couldn't get enough of them, a behaviour that Alice would have found embarrassing from anyone else except him. In Hatter, though, it was just cute. He could get away with absolutely _anything_ with her if he just gave her one of those wide, knee-melting one-dimpled grins that went all the way up to his eyes.

He'd ruined her. Really, really ruined her. Being a hardass was easier when her boyfriends weren't this cute and charming.

So she let him get away with the shirts.

At least in Miami people would just think he was a tourist and wouldn't pay too much attention to him, but she made him get a few calmer ones that he could wear in the airport and in summer _here_ so he wouldn't have to go shopping _again_ once the tundra started melting.

Back at his apartment, she helped him pack.

"How do they manage such a huge range of temperatures in one country?" He asked as he rolled up a pair of swim trunks.

"They're closer to the Equator down there," she said, drawing on some long-suppressed high school science knowledge. "Even when the earth tilts away from the sun in winter, Florida and most of the southern states don't go far enough to really get cold."

He frowned as he thought about that.

"That can't be right," he said finally. "I mean, in order for the curve of a sphere to have an effect like that then the land mass would have to be enormous…" he trailed off, a deeply pensive look on his face.

She had to suppress a sigh. Years ago, four of her best friend JD's cousins came to visit from Ireland and rented a car with the intention of driving cross-country. They didn't even make it to the Pennsylvania border before they became utterly shocked at the sheer _size_ of the US. Eventually they gave up and spent the remainder of their holiday exploring beaches—where all of them came out in such an incredible explosion of freckles that they looked like redheaded sprinkle cupcakes—and drinking, and picking up girls through the strategic application of Irish accents.

She'd seen her fair share of Europeans completely underestimate exactly how huge the country was, considering she lived in a prime tourist destination. There was more distance between her and the nation's capitol than there was between London and Belgium.

"The country's big, Hatter," she explained. "Definitely big enough to take advantage of the curve of a sphere."

"Is that why we have to fly?" He asked. "You said yourself you hate flying."

She winced. "Yeah."

"How long would it take to drive?"

She wrinkled her nose in thought. The one time _she_ drove it took a week because of all of those accidental tours of Incestville, USA.

"I dunno," she said. "Eleven hundred miles. Average fifty miles an hour, drive for eight hours a day, accounting for food and pee breaks…" she did the numbers in her head but Hatter beat her to it.

"Three days," he said. "Just a little less."

"Three days of solid driving for eight hours a day. You could make it in less if you drove twelve hours a day, but then your whole body will atrophy and you'll look like a gargoyle with a steering wheel."

He looked more than a little shocked.

Just like JD's cousins.

o…o

Alice felt like hyperventilating into a paper bag. The smell of the airport was suffocating. She hated flying. No matter how many times she did it—which was often—and no matter how she knew, academically, that she was perfectly safe—which she did, because she'd tried pretty much everything she could think of to reassure herself, including calculating the exact odds of dying in a plane crash, which were really small—the fear always got to her. Her throat seized up in panic and she'd get dizzy and grouchy and snap at all the wrong people, like the TSA guys with their latex gloves and industrial-sized tubes of KY for cavity searches.

Maybe they should've driven. Three days by car wasn't that bad, was it? And now she was older and there were GPSs available so maybe she wouldn't end up in places with names like Kuzzinfuk. And she wouldn't be alone, because really being lost and _alone_ was what'd scared her the last time.

Of course, three days in a car with someone could breed contempt faster than petri dish in a laboratory could grow slime mold. They'd probably fight over radio stations and argue over maps and at least one of them would be dead before they even got over the state lines into the Carolinas.

Driving would never have worked.

The plane it had to be.

She had a prescription for Xanax, which normally she'd be taking about now until they were coming out of her ears. But she didn't want to end up in a drug-induced stupor and leave Hatter to his own devices someplace as sensitive as an airport. All it would take is one teensy little slip of the tongue or misbehaviour for him to be arrested or deported 'back to England' because all of the Wonderland-forged papers he had here said he was a dual-citizen. Or possibly he'd cause an international incident.

So she didn't take her anti-anxiety pills and resolved to white-knuckle it through the day.

They got through security all right. She coached him extensively and very sternly about proper behaviour with the security agents at airports. She warned him not to make his usual jokes or flirt with the lady-guards (because Hatter was Hatter and flirted with absolutely everybody, as if he didn't know how to effectively communicate to women without it); she just told him to do exactly as he was told and wear shoes he could slip off and no, he wasn't allowed to wear his body armour.

By the time they got to the metal detectors, she was pretty sure she'd covered all possible outcomes and hoped he wouldn't do anything stupid. She didn't want Hatter to stand out or draw attention to himself in any way at all, especially not while she was quietly dropping all of her marbles all over LaGuardia.

"You know, you didn't get instruction this explicit when you _stormed the Casino_ and took down the reigning government in Wonderland," he pointed out quietly as they hopped about to put their shoes back on.

"Didn't really have time, did we?" She asked rhetorically. She hadn't been in a joking mood all day.

He caught her when she stumbled and she quickly put her other sneaker back on. Then he took her gently by her shoulders and kissed her deeply; a few of the people around them applauded.

"Cheer up, my love," he told her. "It'll be fine."

They were waiting in the terminal now, and it felt like a countdown to an execution. Maybe Alice _should_ just go for the pills. At least she wouldn't be wound so tight…

As if things weren't bad enough, Hatter had taken to reading about all of the bad things that could happen to them on board the plane. Somewhere in the library he'd found a book on all of the statists of airline accidents and he'd internalized the whole thing.

"Hatter," she said sternly when he told her that jet liners could be brought down by pigeons getting sucked into the engines. "Please stop. Don't talk about any of that shit. Not now. Not ever. _Please_ stop reminding me that we're gonna be on a plane with nothing but the pilot and Bernoulli's Principal between us and a billion-mile plunge straight down to certain death!"

Her voice kept rising as she spoke, to the point where several of the other people were looking over the tops of their newspapers and laptops and trashy checkout-line romance novels to stare at her.

Even Hatter was taken aback.

"I'm sorry," she said softly, leaning her forehead on his shoulder. "I just get… jumpy when I fly."

"You weren't this jumpy on the flamingo," he pointed out.

"I had other things to worry about then."

"You need a distraction?" He asked. Then he waggled his eyebrows and put a hand on her knee.

She grabbed his hand and squeezed all the fingers together. "I'll break every bone in your hand."

Then she dropped it and sighed.

"I'm sorry," she said again.

Xanax was sounding more and more like a good idea. She got up and paced, not caring how many people were staring at her.

Then Hatter grabbed her and pulled her into his lap.

"What're you do—Hatter, it's not gonna work."

"What makes you so sure you know what I intend to do? Hm?" He asked accusingly.

She narrowed her eyes at him.

She squirmed and tried to stand up to go back to her pacing but he held her down.

"Pacing won't make you calm down," he told her.

Snort.

When she tried to stand up again he kept his hold on her, so she stopped trying to get up and instead put her head in her hands and tried to pretend she wasn't in an airport, and she hoped Hatter wouldn't get cheeky with her.

But he didn't try anything and just sat there with her in his lap and stroked her back and her hair like she was a cat.

"I'm not a cat, you know," she grumbled.

"Hush," he murmured, pressing his lips against her hair and kissing her temple.

The hell of it was that it actually _worked_ and in fifteen minutes she felt calmer. Not quite relaxed, but definitely not a tightly-wound spring. She didn't even notice the people around them staring blatantly and the old man reading a Bible who looked at them with a nasty scowl because they were snuggling in an airport terminal.

She sighed.

They boarded the plane and she kept hold of his hand and he let her hold it during takeoff and grasp it so tight she nearly broke his fingers when the plane gave that final enormous lurch and became airborne. He didn't say a word.

When the plane stopped lurching and maintained a steady altitude, she finally dropped his hand.

He leaned over and kissed her.

"Wasn't so bad, was it?"

"The elevator-bus-thing to the Great Library was worse," she said, managing a shaky grin.

He put his arm around her and she rested on his shoulder. He smelled good, comforting—like leather and spice and very strong, sweet tea and _Hatter._

She started to doze off, for the first time _without_ drugs on a plane.

"Why do I feel safe with you?" She asked sleepily.

She felt him shrug under her. "Beats me," he said. "I don't."

He went back to his book and she continued to doze.

"Hatter."

"Mm?"

"Are you reading _Jaws?"_

o…o

The character JD has been mentioned once or twice in other fics; the reason for this is because he plays a rather prominent role in that oft-mentioned chaptered story. I swear one of these days I'll get around to posting it. Also, Toad Suck, Arkansas is a real place. I urge you to look it up if you don't believe me. (There's no way you could pass through it en route between NY and Florida—not unless you were, say, me—but it was too silly a name not to mention.)


	5. The Sunshine State

Farking hell! I slipped on the ice outside the front door and twisted my ankle. Sunuvabitch ice. It's bad enough to hurt like a bitch, but not bad enough to merit painkillers. Damn!

It's been many millions of years since I've been to Florida, so I apologize for the lack of descriptive detail in these last chapters. It's supposed to just be a silly, fluffy story anyway—we all need a little plotless silliness every once in a while. Then I'll get back to being a Serious Writer. (Except, you know, not.)

o…o

Miami International was solid people. She'd been to this airport before, every time she came to Florida, so she knew how to navigate it. And she was good at it, too. Once they were back on the ground she had all of her usual confidence back, rather than leaping into Hatter's lap every time the plane went over those freaking mid-air turbulence-bumps the size of beluga whales.

Alice took him by the hand and propelled him expertly towards the baggage claim, which worked just fine for Hatter because he didn't have to think about where he was going and could just stare in fascination at everything around them. The PA system broadcast announcements about arrivals, departures, delays, and reminders of airport regulations twice, once in English and again in Spanish.

He stopped watching the airport and the people with such fascination when he walked straight into a billboard.

"Maybe you should watch where we're going," she suggested, ducking down to snatch his hat off the ground before a haggard-looking woman with triplets in a carriage could run over it. She dusted it off and handed it to him.

"Ta—I mean thanks." He planted it back on his head. "I thought you said we were meeting your aunt here."

"We are, but she's not allowed to come to the terminal. Airport rules—if you're not getting on a plane and you don't have a ticket, you can't come into this part of the airport. Unless you're picking up a child."

"That sounds excessive," he said.

"Yeah, well… the rules about airports have gotten more and more restrictive since 2001. They're terrified of all the stuff that can go wrong."

He wisely chose not to ask any further questions.

"So what about your aunt?" He asked as they dodged people and airport employees on their way to the baggage claim that was, it felt, somewhere in Louisiana.

"Margo? She's my mom's big sister. She moved here about thirty years ago with her husband. She married… well. _Really_ well."

"Yeh?" He asked, dodging a runaway rolling suitcase and then jogging to catch up with her.

They found the baggage claim and waited for their suitcases to come out, and while they waited Alice told him all about her Aunt Margo.

Margo was her favourite aunt. She and Uncle Vic always left their home open to her, especially during her tumultuous teenage years when she fought with her mom and had no dad. It was kind of a home away from home, Miami. Vic died five years ago, from a heart attack; he was seventeen years older than Margo, but it didn't make it less upsetting. Her aunt was healing now, enjoying life.

"And, um, she's a little… funny," she warned, trying and failing to find a right word or phrase to use so as not to make her aunt look like a loon.

"Funny _how?"_

"Just a little strange," she said, not wanting to scare him.

They fought their way to the edge of the carousel and thankfully found their suitcases thanks to the bright pink ribbons Alice tied to them before they checked them in. An old trick she'd learned a long time ago to help make her own suitcase stand out—ever since she accidentally made her way out of the airport with another woman's case and all of that size-twenty lace thong underwear.

"What do you know," he remarked absently, twirling the ribbon on his suitcase in his fingers. "It worked."

"Of course it did," she said. "I know a few tricks about this travelling business."

Aunt Margo was easy to spot. She was slightly tanned and very freckled, wearing a bright yellow sundress and her hair was dyed an unusual shade of red. Alice didn't know what it was—when women went grey and wanted to dye over it, they always picked the most bizarre colours. She had yet to see a little old lady with a brown dye-job.

"Alice!"

"Hi, Aunt Margo," she said, hugging her. She smelled like cigarettes and sunscreen.

Then the woman looked over her shoulder at Hatter and her eyebrows went up.

"Your mother said you'd be bringing a boyfriend—this him?"

"Yeah—this is David," she remembered not to call him Hatter. "David, this is my aunt, Margo Henley."

Hatter adopted his best 'impressing-the-grownups' expression and extended a hand. "Very nice to meet you, ma'am…"

But Margo didn't take the hand and instead adopted _her_ best 'predatory-old-lady' look and walked very slowly around him, eyeing him carefully.

He looked suddenly really nervous.

"Hmm…" she murmured. "He's cute. And English. Does he maybe have an uncle or someone I can have?"

Now Alice had to bite down on one curled finger to keep from laughing at the absolutely terrified look on Hatter's face. He wasn't even that scared when they were running from the Jabberwocky. Then he practically jumped out of his bright red high-tops and she knew her aunt had gone behind him and goosed him. Because that's what she did. Margo saw a nice-looking butt and just _had_ to pinch it—and Hatter really had a butt that was worth pinching.

"He didn't run away scared," Margo said. "I'd call him a keeper. C'mon, I brought the car. Do you have everything? Let's get out of here, then."

Alice hung behind with Hatter for a bit.

"I'm sorry," she offered lamely.

"She _pinched_ me!" He whisper-yelled.

"Yeah, I, um… sorry."

"If that's gonna set the tone for the next two weeks, I'll make sure to keep my butt away from her."

"Well, can you blame her? It _is_ an uncommonly nice ass," she teased. Then she slid her hand into his back pocket. "Let's hurry up, or she'll leave us behind."

The human brain, Alice remembered from psychology courses, would do things like dull down or all-together eradicate traumatic experiences, so that the memory wouldn't impede further neural function. After all, if everyone remembered all of their most terrifying experiences in clear detail, they'd never get over them. Lessening or completely doing away with things like that kept the brain functioning and kept people from going completely to pieces.

Traffic in Miami was one of those experiences.

No matter how many times she came here, she always ended up _scared to death_ of the traffic like she'd never seen maniac drivers before.

Next to her, Hatter clung to the back seat for dear life, looking distinctly pale at her aunt's driving skills. Margo wasn't a _bad_ driver, she just had to take into account the other four million bad drivers in the immediate vicinity. But she did have an unfortunate habit of yelling at every other driver on the road as if they could hear her. The whole effect was like a nonstop running commentary of disaster.

So Hatter was scared.

She leaned over close to him.

"It's perfectly safe," she whispered. "Safe-ish."

"You will recall we _crashed_ after I said that," he rasped.

She would have said something to reassure him, but just then the car took a sudden huge jerk to the right, running off into the shoulder of the highway as three cars sped past, honking furiously and causing other cars to similarly drive into the shoulder or be flattened.

The car ground to a stop in a hail of gravel and dirt. The seatbelt locked and nearly choked her.

Margo swore colourfully.

"Are you two all right back there?" She asked.

"What the _fuck,_ Margo!" Alice yelled, checking to make sure she still had a pulse. "What the _fucking fuck!_ I thought the Maniac Driver's Club of South Florida met in Biscayne Bay on the weekends!"

"C'mon, you know better than that, Alice—there're maniac drivers all over Florida. Can't just drop 'em all in the bay. They're everywhere!" She rested her forehead against the wheel. "You kids all right back there?"

Hatter was breathing heavy. "I think my life is about to run in front of my face."

"Let me know when it starts, I love a good pantomime," Alice said. Then she went serious. "You're not hurt or anything are you? You're okay?"

"I'll let you know when I can let go of the seat."

They made it into Margo's neighbourhood alive, though it was a close shave what with all the blue-haired octogenarians driving Cadillacs at less than one tenth the legal speed limit, and the possibly-nefarious men driving hotrods at several times the speed of light.

Hatter really thought that the 'Maniac Driver's Club of South Florida' was a real organization; not an unreasonable assumption, considering their close-calls. They had to explain to him that it was a joke, based on the stereotype that most of Miami's residents were either very old or possibly drug-dealers. And most of them had boats and took them out into Biscayne Bay on the weekend, turning the ocean into a marine version of the highway.

Coming from the jungle of apartments in New York, Aunt Margo's house was refreshingly big. With two levels and extra rooms and a garden out front and a patio and a back yard. The beach was a bike-ride away.

"Wow," Hatter murmured as they went from the driveway to the front door. "It's… nice."

Margo cackled. "Thank you, David."

They took their suitcases out of the trunk and into the house, where they were immediately bombarded by the 'welcoming committee'.

"Hi kids," Alice greeted the two dogs, kneeling down so they wouldn't jump on her. "I know, you missed me."

They knocked her on her butt.

"My aunt's an animal lover," she explained as Hatter knelt down next to her to pet them. "She's had dogs since as long as I can remember."

"What are they called?"

He got a wet-nose right in the ear.

"Aack!"

She giggled. "That one's Darwin," she said. Then she scooted the little brown fluffy one closer and pulled him into her lap. "And this is Keno."

Both dogs sniffed Hatter with intense interest because he was _new_ and _interesting_ and _exciting_ and because she was quite boring because she'd been here before. They seemed more than averagely into him; absently she wondered if maybe he didn't still smell a little like Wonderland, even after months away from it. What would Wonderland smell like, anyway?

"All right, boys, leave him alone," she said, getting up and clapping her hands to get their attention. The dogs trotted away.

"I made up your old room and the one next to it," Margo called from the kitchen. "You can go get settled while I make lunch."

Two rooms? Alice looked at Hatter and he wrinkled his nose.

"Umm, Aunt Margo?" She asked, feeling her face heat up.

"Is something wrong?"

"The thing is… two rooms aren't…" she trailed off, feeling completely embarrassed. She looked at Hatter, hoping he'd jump in, but he didn't say anything.

The older woman smirked. "I just said I made up two rooms. I didn't say you had to _use_ two rooms."

Alice had to try hard not to laugh.

Upstairs, she unpacked her suitcase while Hatter stared in fascination out the window.

"You can see the beach from here," he said. "And lots of people."

He unlatched the window and opened it so he could lean out.

"Never seen beaches like that before," he remarked.

"Really?" She asked. "Never?"

He shook his head; she recalled Wonderland's rivers and the big lake separating the Casino from the labyrinthine city, but they all went right up to the forest and vegetation. No beaches, not like these.

"We'll go tomorrow," she said.

He grinned and went back to staring out the window.

"Except for the maniac drivers, it's… well, it's really nice here. And warm."

He looked back over his shoulder again. "We _are_ in the same country still, right?"

"Of course we are."

"It just seems weird. This morning we were freezing to death and here it's downright _balmy."_

"That's just what it's like here. People who can afford it come to the south for the winter."

"Like birds?"

"Snowbirds—that's what they're called."

She tripped over Keno on her way to the window.

"Dammit! Get out from under my feet!" She scolded.

Hatter looked back over at her, frowning.

"Thought you liked dogs."

"I do, but Keno and Darwin are absolutely the two dumbest dogs in Dade County. Possibly the stupidest dogs on the eastern seaboard."

"They like you—they can't be _that_ bad."

She jerked her head towards the bedroom door. "C'mon. I'll show you."

She brought him downstairs to glass back door. The back patio was all stone, with lawn furniture and chairs laid out. Where the patio ended and the grass began, there was a screen door—but no screen left.

"Why's there a door there?" He asked.

"It used to be all screened in," she explained. "A few years ago Hurricane Ike came through and tore it up and now I think it's orbiting Saturn somewhere."

"Hurricane?"

"A big, nasty storm."

"I know what I hurricane is, I read about 'em before we got here. They pass through here and tear up houses?"

"Yeah."

"This place sounds dangerous."

"But warm. Come on, I'll cheer you up and show you how stupid my aunt's dogs are."

"How stupid is stupid?"

She pointed at the still-standing screen door. "They really, really believe that that door is the _only_ way to get outside. Even though they'd just have to walk around it."

He raised his eyebrows.

"I'll prove it—Keno! Darwin! Come on, boys, let's go outside and chase the squirrels!"

There was a clatter of claws on the floor and the dogs came through the kitchen to the back door and Alice slid the glass door open and let them out.

The dogs went right for the screen door and waited for her to open it.

She walked outside after them.

"Well, go on," she told them. "Go outside."

They whined and shifted around on their feet and looked at the door and back at her again.

Hatter watched as she walked around the door and stood on the other side of it.

"Come on, boys. Come on!"

She went back and forth from one side of the door to the other but the dogs didn't understand that they could just walk around the screen door.

Hatter laughed so hard he had to lean on one of the deck chairs.

"Alice! Stop being mean to my dogs!" came a shout from somewhere in the house.

o…o

Before I get a lot of angry emails from dog-lovers, I'm just going to say that I love dogs and have a dog and work with dogs and know lots of dogs. And some of them really, truly are this stupid. And sometimes it's fun to show the stupidity off to people. The exchange about room allocations was borrowed from a show called 'As Time Goes By', which someone pointed out in the reviews. I didn't realize it when I wrote it! My mother watched that show, but I didn't. I guess it stuck with me!


	6. The Mad House

I can't tell you how much I loved writing the garage scene in this chapter. I don't know why, except that it gave me something silly to write. And no, I don't have relatives with a garage like that; I do, however, know _dogs_ like the dogs in this story.

o…o

She rolled out of bed early, early enough for it to still be cool and damp outside. It always took Alice a few days to get used to sleeping in a new place, even here where she visited very often, and for a few days she knew she'd be waking up early whether she liked it or not.

Hatter wasn't in bed but there was a light under the bathroom door. He'd probably shuffle back and fall back into bed and not even notice she was missing.

She pulled on some shorts with the tank-top she slept in and padded downstairs where the dogs were asleep on the leather sofa where they weren't supposed to be. They raised their heads sleepily in mild interest as she came through the room.

"You'd better get off of there before your mama comes downstairs and sees you on her sofa," she said, patting their heads as she walked by.

Outside everything was misty. A woman with leathery-tanned skin and in a hideous orange-and-blue skin-tight jogging suit ran by on the sidewalk. She stepped outside to get the newspaper, but it seemed the paperboy hadn't been yet.

She went into the kitchen.

"Would you like a cup of tea?"

She jumped.

It was Hatter.

He'd found her aunt's stash of tea—she didn't like coffee and so she kept a supply of tea in her house nearly as big as the one he had in his apartment—and was making himself quite at home in nothing but a pair of his new shorts and a hat, sitting with the newspaper at the kitchen table.

"Morning," he said with a soft smile.

"Morning—what are you doing up? I didn't wake you, did I?"

He shook his head. "Naw. I just couldn't sleep."

"You too, huh?"

"Yeah. Sleeping in a strange bed is always weird for me," he said. "Always gives me a hard time sleeping."

"Me too," she said. "Even here—it just feels kind of…"

"Alien," he supplied.

She wasn't sure how she felt about that choice of word, but she nodded.

"I'm sure I'll get used to it," he assured her, bringing her a cup of tea. This early in the morning, even in Miami, it was still _just_ cool enough to merit a warm drink to start the day.

Alice took the tea and sat down to drink. It was strong, which was how Hatter always took his tea, and citrusy and slightly spiced with… something.

They were silent for several minutes.

"Was it hard for you to get used to sleeping here—on this side?" She asked quietly, though that wasn't what she meant and she suspected he knew what she _really_ meant to ask: _'Did you feel uncomfortable sleeping with me?'_

"It's a whole 'nother world," he said softly. "You can't expect I'd feel totally fine and dandy all the time."

She chewed her lower lip nervously; he put his cup down and clasped her hands gently.

"The _place_ is different," he told her. "Sleeping in a new place, a strange bed—yes, it was weird for me. But sleeping with _you—_at the risk of sounding like a total sap, it feels natural. Like I dunno how I've done without it all my life."

It was possible he was over-egging it just to make her smile, but he gave her a soft smile and stroked her hands with his thumbs and she believed him.

'_I love you'_ remained unspoken but understood between them.

She scooted her chair right up next to him and tucked herself under his arm. He looked down from his newspaper and eyed her mostly-bare legs. Years and years of karate and practicing all of those kicks in the dojo had given her legs that she was privately very proud of. She enjoyed showing them off.

And Hatter seemed more than happy to look.

He dropped a hand to her leg and traced figure-eights over her knee and her thigh. She came out in goosebumps.

"Should you be showing this much skin?" He breathed the question in her ear.

"D'you want me to cover up?"

Instead of answering, he kissed her shoulder, and then her neck; then she turned to him and he kissed her. His kiss tasted sweet, lemony and orangey and a little hint of honey from the tea he'd been drinking. He smelled like sleep. The stubble on his cheeks and chin grazed her. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close.

Tea and newspapers and her aunt upstairs asleep were forgotten. Hatter trailed one hand up and down her bare leg, tickling her with his fingernails. Her muscles tightened and she mewed into his kiss.

And then the dogs leaped off the sofa and ran into the kitchen and stood at the back door, going crazy and barking so loudly that Alice felt her eardrums throb.

They sprang apart, taken by surprise.

Keno and Darwin were barking at the back door, Keno with his high-pitched yap and Darwin with his deep hound-doggish arf. Alice jumped up and went to the back door to let them out before they woke Margo up or peed in the house. She went to go back to the table before she remembered that they wouldn't go outside unless she opened the screen door, so she went back outside and tried to open it so they'd _go outside,_ tripping over the dogs as they wove in and out of her legs and whined and barked at the door. For some reason the latch was locked—why she couldn't reasonably think—and she struggled for so long to open it that Keno peed on the patio.

She swore colourfully and plucked the smaller dog up and plopped him down on the grass and gave Darwin a shove with her foot so he'd go around the door and go outside. The two of them looked utterly surprised to find themselves on the grass in the back yard without having passed through the Magical Screen Portal.

Hatter met her at the back door, smirking. She shot him a nasty look.

"It's all go here this morning, isn't it?" He teased.

She would've been angry with him for teasing her, but he kissed her neck and he was there and strategically shirtless so she couldn't manage the anger.

Margo leaned out of the upstairs window so she could look down at them.

"What the fuck was _that?"_ She called down.

"Nothing, Aunt Margo. Just a little negative-IQ-energy to start the morning."

Hatter was stifling his hysterical laughter into her back. If Hatter was amused and not scared of her crazy aunt and stupid dogs, she figured, he was definitely a keeper.

o…o

Alice always thought her aunt had absolutely the most confusing and eccentric garage anywhere in the continental United States. And it defied the laws of physics, too, by managing to contain far more than seemed realistically possible for the size of the space. Decades worth of discarded hobbies and obsessions and weird collections were crammed into it, gathering dust and housing spiders and all of it precariously—and sometimes _improbably—_balanced in such a way that the slightest movement would cause a total catastrophic avalanche.

It was why she didn't keep her car in the garage. It didn't _fit_ anymore.

But it _was_ where she kept her collection of circa-1950s bicycles, and she and Hatter were going to bike to the beach, so they ventured carefully into the garage to find them.

The whole thing smelled like old wood, dust, stale air, chemicals, and leather.

"Whoa," Hatter exclaimed as she flipped on the light inside. He took in the clutter of madness around him. "Where'd all this stuff _come_ from?"

"You know, I have no idea. I dunno if Aunt Margo even remembers."

She stepped over an old-fashioned child-sized sled resting upside-down inside a 30s-vintage Radio Flyer red wagon, carefully tucking her dress up so it didn't catch on the sled's runners.

"Hey, I used to have one of these in my tea shop!" She heard him exclaim; worriedly, she turned over her shoulder to see what, exactly, in her aunt's myriad collection of weird items Hatter used to keep in his tea shop.

He was standing in front of a jukebox, brushing the dust off the glass window with his hand.

"Really?" She couldn't help but wonder what kind of songs a jukebox in Wonderland would play. He'd had that huge set of headphones on the back of his chair, she remembered, when she first met him, but she'd never asked about the native music and he'd never mentioned it.

"Yeah!" He wrinkled his nose as the dust got into his face. "I had to get rid of it after a couple of Suits raided the place and destroyed it."

She frowned. She didn't like being reminded of how much danger he used to live in—it scared her, knowing what could've happened.

He gave a shrug, as if it didn't matter. "Most of the time when someone stupid broke it, I could put it back together, but after that I figured it was just time to put it to sleep."

She snorted.

He looked around the back. "Does this one still work?"

Shrug. "I dunno. Why, thinking of opening a new tea shop on Miami Beach somewhere?"

"No, I want it in my flat."

"I don't think we can take it on the plane with us back to New York," she said. "Plus, where the _hell_ would you _put it?"_

"In the bedroom?"

"Oh, yeah, just what we need—a soundtrack."

He picked up her sarcasm but ignored it completely. "Why not?" He grinned cheekily, then punched a few buttons and looked extremely disappointed when it didn't light up and play.

"They don't work when they're not plugged in, you know," she said.

"Pity."

She picked her way across to where the bikes where suspended upside-down from the ceiling; she almost tripped when she found herself in a rowboat she didn't even know existed. It was once bright blue but was now flaking probably-lead-based paint all over the Seminole woven rug underneath it.

"You okay?" He asked, trying to get over to her and disturbing the delicate balance of _stuff_ in the garage. A box of old lamp parts and a bowling pin and an old set of skis and a mostly-deflated beach-ball and a taxidermy platypus tumbled down on and around him. "What the _fuck?"_ He held the platypus out at arm's length with the very tips of his fingers.

"Oh, we used to call him Grady."

"It has a _name?"_ He looked shocked.

"Yeah. He used to sit on the table by the front door, and hold all our keys and scarves and stuff, but when Aunt Margo redecorated she didn't know where else to put him." She reached over and patted Grady, now a little moth-eaten with a spider web stretched out between his bill and the wooden base he stood on.

"What _is _it, exactly?"

"A platypus. Put him down, he's probably full of bugs by now."

He put Grady down _very_ quickly.

"'Scuze me, ma'am," he said as he passed a naked female mannequin wearing a First World War German army helmet and a metal sandwich-board advertising Absinthe in Portuguese.

"These just un-hook from the ceiling," she told him as she grasped one of the bikes by the handlebars and lifted it down. "Maybe it's best you stand where you are. I'll pass the bikes to you and you can carry 'em into the house. You know, instead of risking another avalanche and getting buried under all this crap."

"Good idea…"

There were four bikes hanging from the garage rafters but she could only get to two of them from where she was standing, unless she wanted to stand with one foot in a rusty bucket and the other on a miniature rocking chair. Which she didn't really want to do because she wasn't up-do-date on her tetanus shots. So she took down the two she could reach and passed them to Hatter, who carefully set them in the house. One was a weird mint-green colour and the other was _bright_ pink.

A quick check of the tires proved they were fine to ride on and they carried the bikes out through the front door, since the garage door couldn't open without everything inside spilling out like a cluttered closet in a TV sitcom.

"I'll take the pink one," he offered once they were outside in the late-morning sunshine.

She raised her eyebrows at him.

"I know you hate pink," he said. "Plus it matches my shirt."

He was wearing one of his annoyingly loud-patterned Hawaiian shirts, white with bright pink flowers on it.

"You _do_ know how to ride a bike, right?" She asked, wanting to check with him before she let him loose in a residential area with anything bigger than half a roller skate.

"Of course I do," he huffed, incredulous. "This world and Wonderland aren't _that_ much different and I _did_ have one of these growing up."

They wheeled the bikes down the driveway to the sidewalk.

"I used to ride it around with no hands." He got a cocky grin on his face when he told her that.

"Everyone did that," she said.

"Yeah, but I lived in a city ten thousand feet off the ground," he pointed out.

"Oh. Yeah. I bet that makes a difference."

Then she shuddered.

"Hey, c'mon, it's not like I'm gonna get nostalgic and start riding this thing around on the roof or something."

Alice strapped a bag with towels and water bottles and SPF a million sunscreen—because Mother Nature did not intend for _really_ white girls like Alice to play in the sun, even in the middle of January—to the back of the green bike and went to get on.

A familiar voice yelled from the front door.

"Alice, fix your dress! They can see your underoos in _Tallahassee!"_

Margo yelled it so loudly that the gardeners in the yards of two of the surrounding houses, the woman out walking her dog, the builder across the street, and the kid on the skateboard who was obviously skipping school all stopped to look for themselves.

She tucked her dress around her legs and turned a remarkable shade of pink not unlike Hatter's bike and shirt.

He was looking, too, and smiling that one-dimple smile.

"She can really yell, can't she?"

"Thanks for drawing it to everyone's attention!" She screamed back.

Hatter winced.

"What?" She asked him.

"_You_ can really yell, too." He shook his head like a dog irritated by a fly.

"Oh, come on, before people start asking to see my underwear."

The bike ride quickly turned into a race down the hill out of the neighbourhood and along the road through town. It was a Monday morning and most people were on their way to work and school, too busy for the beach; there were a few people around who were on vacation or who just didn't work, but it was hardly peak season for beaches.

The morning was warm and a little breezy and the maniac drivers were all safely on the highway and off the roads they were riding alongside to get to the beach.

She let Hatter win their race.

He tried to show her that he could still ride without the handlebars, lost control of the bike, and fell into a retaining wall.

She stopped her bike next to him.

"Men your age probably shouldn't try to relive their childhoods," she said, offering him a hand.

"Is that meant to be a reference to me being an old man?" He demanded.

"Of course not."

He tilted his head.

"What?"

He lifted the hem of her dress a bit and looked up.

"Hey!" She slapped his hand.

"I've never seen _those_ before."

"Do you _mind?"_

"Nope," he said, popping the 'p'. "Do you?"

They moved on when people started slowing down and honking at them.

There were still people on the beach, but where Alice took them it wasn't hugely crowded. She made sure the bikes are locked up, because this is Miami and anything not locked up or nailed down is likely to suddenly walk away. She spread a towel on the sand for them to sit on and they kicked off their sneakers—Hatter fell in love with the classic old Converse because they came in lots of different colours and he hardly ever wore two of the same colour; today though both of them were black.

Alice reached for the sunscreen in her bag.

"What's that?" He asked as she slathered a layer of it on her arms and legs.

"Sunscreen. It'll keep me from getting burned." She made a face. "I'll turn the colour of a traffic cone if I don't."

He snorted. "A very _cute_ traffic cone, I'm sure."

She pulled her hair aside. "Could you do my back, please?"

Of course he did.

"You should put some on, too," she suggested, eyeing his extremely pale legs as he smoothed the lotion on her back in a manner that was _far_ more erotic than it should've been.

"No thanks," he said, smelling the hand and making a face. "It smells funny."

"Traffic-cone-chic won't suit you," she warned.

"I'll risk it."

Explaining the likelihood that he could get cancer from sun exposure probably wouldn't convince him—and anyway, it was January, not August, and saying it would just be a total overreaction to his refusal. Let him get nasty sunburns and end up peeling off a layer of skin the size of his whole body. It would only take once.

People-watching was Alice's favourite spectator sport—and in a place as wild and eccentric as Miami, she could easily make a day out of it. There were so many thoroughly odd people in this place that it could give Wonderland a run for its money.

Hatter's mouth fell open at the sight of a dozen women in wispy, barely-there swimsuits wandering past.

"You'll have to blink eventually, you know," she pointed out.

"I'll work on that."

A man in a Speedo on rollerblades was warbling out some Gwen Stefani tune off-key as he rolled by on the boardwalk.

"Amazing," Hatter murmured.

"What is?"

"That three square inches of fabric is all that separates most of these people from public nudity charges."

She laughed.

The seagulls screeched overhead; behind them, traffic went by as people too busy to notice the beach went about their business.

The breeze was cool and the air was warm and it smelled like brine and sand.

The water was bluish green with pale blue caps where the waves crested.

From here they could watch the boats out on the water—speedboats, sailboats, big and small leisure boats, fishing boats of varying quality, long sleek motorboats with far more engines than necessary. Those boats, she knew, were probably drug-boats.

"Smugglers, huh?" He asked as he saw one of those motorboats go by.

She frowned. "How'd you…?" she asked it before she had the chance to think about it.

He leaned over and nudged her with his shoulder.

"I would know these things," he told her with a grimace.

Hatter didn't like remembering his past and the things he had to do to survive any more than Alice liked to think about it.

She reached for his hand and threaded her fingers through his and leaned over to kiss his shoulder; he pressed his lips against her hair and wrapped an arm around the small of her back and rested his hand on her hip.

"Seems like a dangerous place," he mused quietly. "Hurricanes that can rip up the houses, people who steal things, crazy drivers, sharks in the water, drug dealers, dangerous people…"

"Oh, yeah," she agreed. "Miami can be kind of a dangerous place."

"And Wonderland was too much for you."

She shrugged.

"It's a nice break from winter, but… why d'you like it so much?" He asked.

She shifted and leaned forward on her tucked-up knees. He ran his fingernails up and down her back through the thin fabric of her dress, making her shiver pleasantly.

"I guess because I used to spend a lot of time here," she said. "Before my dad left—before he was taken away—we used to come down here to visit Aunt Margo and Uncle Vic. And sometimes my parents would send me down here for a few weeks in summer so they could have a little time to themselves."

She brushed some sand off of a little tiny conch shell and palmed it, turning it over and over in her hand. She craned her neck to look at Hatter, staring down at her.

"And then… well, that summer, after my dad was gone, my mom sent me here so she could go looking for him. You can't take an eleven-year-old girl on a cross-country trip like that, can you?"

He didn't offer an answer; she didn't expect one.

"My mom started doing that every summer while I was a kid. Every school vacation—summer, winter, spring, it didn't matter—she'd send me here so she could go look for him. Well, Aunt Emily wasn't really stable then. She was just getting out of a bad marriage and putting her life back together, so it only made sense for me to come here with Margo and Vic."

"So she just… dumped you here?" He asked, frowning. "Sounds kind of… doesn't sound like fun for a kid."

"Actually, I liked it. I still came, even after I was old enough to go with my mom to look for Daddy. It was a place to get away, you know? I had no dad, I fought with my mom like any other teenager—and they always let me stay here whenever I wanted."

He flattened his hand and smoothed it up over her back and cupped her opposite shoulder.

"When I was here, it was like everything was normal. I didn't think about my dad being gone and I didn't think about my mom leaving me here to go look for him and I didn't think about all the bullshit going on in my life. When I came here, it was like I had a regular family again. I had a mom and a dad and a place to stay. My life was crazy in New York, but not here. It was… it was something _steady,_ and I needed that."

She burrowed her feet in the sand.

"Guess I still need it."

He tucked a bit of hair behind her ear and kissed her cheek.

"The Great Library was a little like that," he said. "Maybe not really, but… a little piece of old Wonderland. How things used to be before she took over. I guess even a little safe-haven in a dangerous place is still a safe-haven."

Nod.

"You know, I think I was sadder when Uncle Vic died than I was when… when Daddy died."

She frowned.

"That sounds awful, doesn't it?"

He hugged her around her shoulders.

"No, it doesn't," he whispered.

He tilted her chin up and kissed her.

Two passerbys whistled at them.

o…o

Well, that got rather more serious than I expected it to. They went from Aunt Margo's Crazy Garage of Mad Miscellany (say this _fast,_ I dare you) to talking about why Alice likes Miami. I don't know why I did it that way. It just seemed… sweet. I'll put some fluff in the next chapter, I promise. Maybe I'll write porn or something…


	7. Winterland, Redux

I never meant to let so much time go by between updates of this story! I'm so sorry. I got caught up with 'Day to Day' and an alternate-ending fic and life has been doing funny things on me lately. Why is it that everything has to happen all at the same time? I can deal with crazy in small, controlled doses, but it all seems to gang up on me all at once. Anyway, sorry again for the delay! I hope you enjoy this last chapter.

o…o

She sighed, looking at her legs and her arms and looking at her back in the bathroom mirror. So much for sunscreen—she still turned quite pink on the beach. It'd turn brown in a few days, but still. And all of her freckles came out, too. She wrinkled her spotted nose in the mirror and checked on the water level in the bathtub behind her.

Even despite her sunburn they went to the beach again today and this time they went in the water, so she was covered all over in salt and sand and needed to wash it all off.

Hatter didn't go too far into the water, though. He was too afraid.

Having read _Jaws_ on the plane, Hatter was now terrified of sharks, especially after she admitted that yes, sharks did make it as far as Miami. Pointing out that the story took place on Long Island did little to convince him; nor did statistics, because frankly he was more likely to get hit by lightning _and_ win the lottery on the same day. The fact that there were sharks in the vicinity of Miami scared him enough not to go more than knee-deep in the water.

She took him out on her uncle's old motor boat, too, and he was fine with that, except for making nonstop running commentary on her boat-handling skills until she got tired of hearing it and let him drive it.

He drove the boat into a sandbar hidden less than a foot under the water and then got squeamish when she told him to get out and help her push the boat back off.

"For crying out loud, Hatter!" She'd yelled in exasperation after he whimpered about sharks again. "It's perfectly safe!"

"But we're in the middle of the Gulf Stream! It's a giant intercontinental rapid mass-transit system for sharks!"

"Look, the water's not even up to my knees! The deadly man-eating-but-very-flat shark isn't around, okay?"

After he had his few minutes of being scared of sharks that weren't there, he got out of the boat and helped her push it off the sandbar and they went on their way. Out on the water, all alone with Hatter… it was an enjoyable afternoon.

Even though she was paying for it now that her freckles had all come out and she was all one big itchy sunburn. In contrast, Hatter turned nicely bronze. And didn't burn. Or freckle. It made her hate him.

On the other side of the bathroom door he was gleefully going through a trunk he dragged out of her aunt's garage; Margo had apparently told him that he could have whatever he liked out of an old steamer trunk, provided he could get it out of the garage without disturbing everything else in there. Somehow, he did it, and the trunk was full of really old clothes, which were absolutely Hatter's forte.

He was like a kid in a candy store, unfolding coats and trousers and uniforms and—oh, the joy!—hats from this trunk and filling the room with the smell of old cloth and the slight reek of mothballs. He was probably going to go back to New York with a second suitcase.

The last time she saw him, he was pulling on an old Green Beret's uniform, complete with the beret. Aunt Margo didn't seem to remember who it'd belonged to or where it came from, but it looked… _really_ good on Hatter. Absurdly good. Alice had never been one for men in uniform, but Hatter standing barefoot in the middle of the bedroom with the beret and trousers on— unfastened, hanging dangerously low on his hips—and pulling the smart green uniform coat on over his bare chest made her go all watery at the knees.

That was when she made her way into the bathroom then for a bath, because she didn't feel like savaging him right then, not while her aunt was still home and the two dogs were watching keenly. The dogs were always getting in the way—Hatter said he couldn't do anything while they were watching because he felt like they'd pipe in with a lot of really snarky comments. Jack, her phone, Margo's dogs… the list of things that kept getting in their way was steadily expanding.

And he was so caught up in the contents of the trunk that he probably wouldn't've noticed her standing naked in front of him anyway.

She turned off the water and settled into the tub to wash the beach off.

The tub was big enough that she could lie down and stretch out in it with several inches of clearance at her head and at her feet. Such a luxury.

She was just finishing getting the salt out of her hair when the bathroom door flung open. There was Hatter, now wearing a faded pair of snug motorbike jeans with the cuffs turned up—reminiscent of James Dean; for all she knew they'd once _belonged_ to James Dean—and a white t-shirt. He had a mass of black-and-gold fabric slung over his arm and a strand of cobweb clinging to his always-crazy hair, and that big goofy grin on his face. She loved that grin, wide and slightly buck-toothed, going all the way up to his eyes, and one dimple at the corner.

"This is _great!"_ He said gleefully. "She said if there's anything I want, I can keep it!"

She folded her arms on the side of the tub and rested her head on them. "Enjoying yourself, are you?"

He nodded.

"It's amazing one woman can have so much _stuff_ and not know where half of it came from."

He unfurled the coat in his arms—it was long and black, silk probably, with gold and silver embroidery on the back and a high collar that fastened with gold frogs; shiny gold buttons and gold braid went down the front from the neck to the waist, and from the waist to the floor it was open and flared out.

Just Hatter's style, she thought absently.

"She said this came from someplace called Kazakhstan. Where is that?"

"Somewhere near Russia, I think," she said. "Maybe." Really, she had no idea. "She might've been there about 25 years ago."

"She went _there?_ Isn't that supposed to've been a really dangerous area?"

"I dunno if she did or not. But things being dangerous never stopped her from doing 'em."

He gave her a sly look. "Runs in the family, does it?"

Shrug.

"To be honest, I think she's bullshitting. She doesn't know or remember where most of what she keeps in her garage came from. I'm pretty sure she didn't even buy it herself—I think junk migrates to Florida and makes its home in Aunt Margo's garage. Junk comes from as far away as Siberia to live in there."

"The junk has good taste, then. There's another trunk in there, I think I'll go back for it."

He folded the coat up and set it on the green granite counter. Then he leaned into the mirror and frowned at his reflection, carefully picking the spider web out of his hair.

"Can we stay here another few days so I can go through that garage?" He asked cheerfully, looking at her through the mirror.

She quirked an eyebrow. "A few days? You'll need about a month just to make your way through the first few feet."

"Okay, then," he said, turning around and coming to sit on the edge of the tub. "I can live with that. Just as long as someone goes in there a few times a day and leaves me a sandwich and a cup of tea, I think I could probably _live_ in there."

She should have suspected that Margo and Hatter would be kindred spirits through their mutual love of _weird stuff,_ but she couldn't help a giggle. He'd been so serious in Wonderland, so tough, like he'd long since forgotten how to have fun or be silly—seeing him happily going through collections of old clothes and things with all the eagerness and excitement of a young child made her heart melt.

"What's so funny?" He asked, reaching into the bathwater and splashing her.

She stuck her tongue out at him. _"You_ are. You're like a kid in a candy store with the garage."

"It's _brilliant."_

Casually, she leaned on one elbow and looked up at him. "I feel like I'm second to my aunt's stuff."

She wasn't upset about it, she just felt like giving him shit and teasing him; even so, he got a concerned look on his face and slid down to sit on the floor so he could be face-to-face with her over the side of the tub. He moved in as if to kiss her and at the last second pulled away and splashed her again.

"Hey!"

She splashed him back because he was close enough to splash now, then scooted away from him across the tub before he could get her back. When he reached across to grab her, she grabbed his arms with the intention of pulling him fully-clothed into the water with her. It nearly worked—he ended up in the tub from the waist up.

"That's playing dirty!" He snapped, holding himself out of the water on his hands.

"No, it's not. It's a bathtub. It's very clean."

He gave her a look, but he was smiling and the smile went all the way up to his eyes.

"I'm sure you'll get over it," she assured him.

She curled one hand around the back of his neck and pecked him gently on the lips.

"Better?" She asked, leaning back from him.

"Maybe a bit. The kiss helped," he said with a sly smile. Then he leaned in and kissed her softly.

And then a little harder.

And then a bit harder still.

Then he must've forgotten where he was, because he moved to put one hand around her waist and the other on the back of her neck and, his hands no longer holding him up, he fell into the water and landed nearly in Alice's lap.

She laughed so hard her stomach hurt.

Now he was _really_ soaked, and his hair all wet and sticking to his face and he was dripping into the water as he held himself back up.

He shook his hair out and looked down at his soaked shirt.

"Oh, well," he said with a shrug. "In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess."

He climbed into the tub, vintage jeans and wet t-shirt and all.

Alice giggled until he sloshed over to her and towered on his hands and knees over her—then she looked up at him and the laughter froze in her throat.

Wet, curly strands of hair stuck to his face and neck and curled up at the bottoms; his t-shirt, already fitted when dry, was clinging to him and see-through. The jeans were wet and tight and stuck to him. His eyes were lusty, hard.

He licked his lips.

She sat up quick and crashed their mouths together. He kissed her hungrily, roughly. She grasped him tight around his shoulders and threaded on hand up through his hair, tugging slightly; when she pulled his hair, he jerked closed and kissed her harder. She did it again to elicit the same response.

He wrapped one arm around her waist and pulled her close up out of the bathwater. When he rolled his hips into her, she returned the action.

Her head lolled back and he kissed and lipped his neck.

They weren't used to having this much room. A bathtub big enough for two people was in and of itself a novelty—a tub big enough for two people _and_ whatever activities they cared to do in there was not about to go to waste.

She forgot to hate him for being tan and not freckling.

In the morning, Hatter woke up first—quite _early—_and made tea downstairs in the kitchen. For all that the days were plenty hot, the nights were cool because it _was_ still January. The stone floor in the kitchen held onto the cold of the evening for a long time and he danced around on his bare feet; the dogs took a sudden and intense interest in him because he was in the kitchen and therefore must have had food for him.

"Will you two go back to sleep?" He whisper-yelled at them. He nudged little Keno aside with his foot when the dog started climbing on his leg. "It's not even six in the morning yet! I've got nothin' for you! Go on, scram!"

Darwin wet-nosed him on the back of the knee and he jumped straight up and sat on the counter and nearly landed in the sink.

He took his tea—and Alice's—into the bedroom rather than deal with the dogs. They romped up the stairs after him and he closed the door on them rather than have them jumping on the bed and waking Alice up and spoiling his morning. He sat drinking his tea in the big window and looking out at Miami, still asleep and quiet and nondescript outside.

"You're up early for someone who put in two encore performances yesterday."

He turned to see Alice sitting up in bed, the blankets bunching around her waist. She was beautifully sleep-rumpled, her cheeks pink, her eyes half-lidded and drowsy, looking, to Hatter's mind, quite thoroughly and deliciously debauched. She was still naked and had an enormous hickey on her left breast. A good job no one else was going to see that, he thought as he admired his handiwork.

"It's the holiday," he said over his tea. "Strangely re-energizing, you know, all this warm weather and sunshine."

She slipped out of bed and into her knickers and a t-shirt—a _white_ t-shirt that could clearly be seen through even from across the room—and picked up the other cup of tea and came to sit opposite him in the window. They drank in silence for a few moments, watching the paperboy sleepily ride his bike up the road and occasionally bump into a mailbox or a lawn flamingo.

"Eventually we're gonna have to pack up and go back to New York and winter and work and all that jazz."

"Yeah, I know. But we can always come back, right?"

She smiled. "Sure we can. It's a nice place to come to when you're sick of normal life."

He gave a nod. A winter without a winter, he thought absently.

He could get used to this.

o…o

I hope this last chapter doesn't disappoint, as long as it took for me to get around to finishing it and posting it. I know there's no real plot in this story, it was just an opportunity for a little fun and cuteness. We need a little fun and cuteness every now and then, right? Maybe Hatter and Alice will go back to Miami—or maybe Aunt Margo will come visit New York. She's grown on me as a character. She's crackers and I love her!

Anyway, thanks to everyone who's been reading—thanks for coming with me on this silly ride!


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